Key Arguments

• He confesses that in his ignorance he was disturbed and misled by stock Manichaean questions linking God to bodily form and Old Testament violence and polygamy: “I was unaware of the existence of another reality, that which truly is,23‘ and it was as if some sharp intelligence were persuading me to consent to the stupid deceivers when they asked me: ‘Where does evil come from? and is God confined within a corporeal form? has he hair and nails? and can those be considered righteous who had several wives at the same time and killed people and offered animals in sacrifice?’”
• He explicitly states the privation account of evil which he did not yet know at that time: “I did not know that evil has no existence except as a privation of good, down to that level which is altogether without being.”
• He explains that his inability to grasp this stemmed from a sensualist conception of cognition, reducing all ‘seeing’ to bodily imaging: “How could I see this when for me ‘to see’ meant a physical act of looking with the eyes and of forming an image in the mind?”
• He acknowledges his former ignorance of God’s spiritual nature and non‑bodily mode of presence: “I had not realized God is a Spirit (John 4: 24), not a figure whose limbs have length and breadth and who has a mass. For mass is less in a part than in its whole, and if it is unlimited, it is less in a part defined within a given space than in its unlimited extension.25 It is not everywhere entire as a Spirit and as God.”
• He admits he also did not know what in us constitutes our being or how being in God’s image works: “Moreover, I was wholly ignorant of what it is in ourselves which gives us being, and how scripture is correct in saying that we are ‘in God’s image’ (Gen. 1: 27).”

Source Quotes

9: 17). She seduced me; for she found me living outside myself, seeing only with the eye of the flesh, and chewing over in myself such food as I had devoured by means of that eye. vii (12) I was unaware of the existence of another reality, that which truly is,23‘ and it was as if some sharp intelligence were persuading me to consent to the stupid deceivers when they asked me: ‘Where does evil come from? and is God confined within a corporeal form? has he hair and nails? and can those be considered righteous who had several wives at the same time and killed people and offered animals in sacrifice?’24 In my ignorance I was disturbed by these questions, and while travelling away from the truth I thought I was going towards it. I did not know that evil has no existence except as a privation of good, down to that level which is altogether without being.

She seduced me; for she found me living outside myself, seeing only with the eye of the flesh, and chewing over in myself such food as I had devoured by means of that eye. vii (12) I was unaware of the existence of another reality, that which truly is,23‘ and it was as if some sharp intelligence were persuading me to consent to the stupid deceivers when they asked me: ‘Where does evil come from? and is God confined within a corporeal form? has he hair and nails? and can those be considered righteous who had several wives at the same time and killed people and offered animals in sacrifice?’24 In my ignorance I was disturbed by these questions, and while travelling away from the truth I thought I was going towards it. I did not know that evil has no existence except as a privation of good, down to that level which is altogether without being. How could I see this when for me ‘to see’ meant a physical act of looking with the eyes and of forming an image in the mind?

I did not know that evil has no existence except as a privation of good, down to that level which is altogether without being. How could I see this when for me ‘to see’ meant a physical act of looking with the eyes and of forming an image in the mind? I had not realized God is a Spirit (John 4: 24), not a figure whose limbs have length and breadth and who has a mass.

How could I see this when for me ‘to see’ meant a physical act of looking with the eyes and of forming an image in the mind? I had not realized God is a Spirit (John 4: 24), not a figure whose limbs have length and breadth and who has a mass. For mass is less in a part than in its whole, and if it is unlimited, it is less in a part defined within a given space than in its unlimited extension.25 It is not everywhere entire as a Spirit and as God.

For mass is less in a part than in its whole, and if it is unlimited, it is less in a part defined within a given space than in its unlimited extension.25 It is not everywhere entire as a Spirit and as God. Moreover, I was wholly ignorant of what it is in ourselves which gives us being, and how scripture is correct in saying that we are ‘in God’s image’ (Gen. 1: 27). (13) I also did not know that true inward justice which judges not by custom but by the most righteous law of almighty God.

Key Concepts

• I was unaware of the existence of another reality, that which truly is,23‘ and it was as if some sharp intelligence were persuading me to consent to the stupid deceivers when they asked me: ‘Where does evil come from? and is God confined within a corporeal form? has he hair and nails? and can those be considered righteous who had several wives at the same time and killed people and offered animals in sacrifice?’24
• I did not know that evil has no existence except as a privation of good, down to that level which is altogether without being.
• How could I see this when for me ‘to see’ meant a physical act of looking with the eyes and of forming an image in the mind?
• I had not realized God is a Spirit (John 4: 24), not a figure whose limbs have length and breadth and who has a mass.
• Moreover, I was wholly ignorant of what it is in ourselves which gives us being, and how scripture is correct in saying that we are ‘in God’s image’ (Gen. 1: 27).

Context

Book III, section vii (12): Looking back on his Manichaean phase, Augustine contrasts his earlier anthropomorphic and moralistic objections with his mature doctrine of evil as privation and God as incorporeal Spirit, noting that his sensual epistemology blocked him from recognizing true being and the imago Dei.